CHANTILLY, Va. IT engineering firm Vencore won a prime contract from the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to explore and provide technologies for new security models to support information-sharing in tactical coalition environments using commercial handheld devices.

Phase 1 of the project -- valued at $4.1 million -- will be undertaken as part of DARPA’s Secure Handhelds on Assured Resilient networks at the tactical Edge (SHARE) program over the next three years.

The aim of VeriNet is to enable secure information-sharing at multiple levels of security with an intuitive user interface at the tactical edge using commercial handheld devices while minimizing the use of scarce handheld resources. The solution will also be designed to deliver secure tactical-edge networking technologies based on NDN, an emerging networking technique that provides packet-level security and high resilience to loss while remaining agile for the dynamic, highly mobile, and diverse tactical environment. The Vencore team will design rapid deployment capabilities for coalitions with custom information-sharing rules, while guaranteeing correctness of coalition configurations.